One of my goals this month was to play more VR titles. Now that I have a new router with a 5ghz band I can take full advantage of Air Play on the Quest 2. Of course, Dagon doesn’t need the full capabilities of Air Play since there’s hardly and movement

In fact, I struggle to call Dagon a game at all. Right at the beginning you’re told that this is an interactive adaptation of an HP Lovecraft short story of the same name. It’s focused on story and atmosphere rather than game play. I’d call it a VR “experience” but that just sounds pretentious. It’s more of a walking simulator without the walking and you can only turn your head.

I love horror but I’ve never been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. I always found the “indescribable horrors” to be somewhat of a cop-out. But having it read by a fantastic narrator and having the associated scenes played out changes things a lot. I’m all for this narrative driven, limited game play, style of game. It’s like a VR audio book with pictures. . Being a Lovecraft story, there aren’t any jump scares, just an ever mounting sense of dread.

For an interactive story there isn’t much to interact with either. Each scene goes something like this: the narrator reads a few lines, you look around the scene, find the object to click on that advances to the next screen, rinse and repeat. Sometimes there are additional objects in the scene that will bring up trivia either about Lovecraft or about the time period the short story was written. 

After finishing, I found out I missed a majority of the trivia item only finding five out of twenty. The one’s I did find were interesting but a bit hard to read in VR. I may do another play through and see if I can find more. The whole thing runs about 30 minutes long so it’s not a huge time commitment.

I very much enjoyed Dagon and would highly recommend it, especially in VR. The sense of scale in the scenes adds to the atmosphere immensely and I found myself fully immersed in what was going on. Since there is no forward movement it’s not likely to induce motion sickness

Dagon is also available as a “flat screen” title . I played a little of it to get some screenshots for this post and it’s still pretty good. You can only move the mouse 180 degrees so it might be easier to find those trivia objects. Best of all, both versions are free!